Study: Expand Abortion Access by Expanding the Types of Professionals Who Can Provide Care

In the United States, 87 percent of counties have no abortion provider, forcing some women to travel potentially long distances for reproductive health services, while others delay making a decision until later in the pregnancy, when an abortion is more costly and restrictions are more severe.

One way to increase access is to increase the range of providers who are permitted to do abortions, such as nurse practitioners, nurse midwives, and physician assistants.

Currently, non-physician clinicians can perform surgical (aspiration) abortions legally only in Montana, Oregon, New Hampshire and Vermont. In some states, these providers can oversee medication abortions, though that, too, has become a contentious issue as more legislatures seek to restrict women’s access to abortion.

Are laws requiring physicians to perform surgical abortions necessary, from a patient-safety perspective? Not according to a recently published study.

Tracy Weitz, director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a collaborative research group and think tank at University of California, San Francisco, and Diana Taylor, ANSIRH’s director of research and evaluation, primary care initiative, set out to answer the question of healthcare outcomes and applied for a waiver of California legal statutes that limit surgical abortion to physicians. They note:

In 2008, 1.21 million abortions took place in the United States, with more 200,000 (18%) in the State of California. Nationally, 92% of abortions take place in the ﬁrst trimester, but Black, uninsured, and low-income women have less access to this care. In California, only 87% of women using state Medicaid insurance obtain abortions in the ﬁrst trimester. Because the average cost of a second-trimester abortion is substantially higher than that of a ﬁrst-trimester procedure, shifting the population distribution of abortions to earlier gestations would result in safer, less costly care. Increasing the types of health care professionals involved in abortion care is one way to reduce this health care disparity.

For the purpose of the study, 40 certified nurse midwives, nurse practitioners and physician assistants in ANSIRH’s Health Workforce Pilot Project, who already had experience with medication abortions, were trained to perform surgical abortions. (ANSIRH’s Early Abortion Training Workbook, which is used in medical schools around the world, is also available online.)

The authors compared the outcomes of abortions performed by those medical professionals to outcomes of abortions performed by 96 physicians. Patients were not randomized to a provider type; they were asked if they would agree to have the non-MD provider on duty perform their first trimester abortion.

Complications were rare in general, with only 1.3 percent of the 11,487 abortions resulting in any type of complication. While the newly trained CNM/NP/PA group had slightly more complications than the group with abortions performed by more clinically experienced MDs, the difference was not considered significant.

The authors conclude that “only 1 additional complication would occur for every 120 procedures as a consequence of having an NP, CNM, or PA as the abortion provider,” and these would largely be minor complications, such as a low-level infection or bleeding that could be treated at home or at an out-patient clinic.

The beneﬁts of expanding access to abortion for California’s women outweigh the small initial difference in risk, particularly because it would likely move many second-trimester abortions into the ﬁrst trimester, signiﬁcantly decreasing the overall risk of complications, which increases with gestational age. Expanded access is also likely to afford more women the opportunity to obtain care without the additional indirect costs associated with traveling to a geographically distant abortion provider.

We would hope, after reading this study, that more state legislatures would consider removing restrictions on non-physician clinicians, but we know such a move would require great amounts of political will, as the trend in recent years has been to restrict rather than increase access.

One Comment

Increasing the number of people who can perform a termination is a wise thing to do. It will ensure that women do not risk their lives with untrained people and will not delay a decision to terminate. It is the right thing to do indeed.